


we are silver and gold

by Allegory



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Keith x Shiro, M/M, Pining, SHEITH - Freeform, SheithMonth2k17, Shiro x Keith - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 21:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11837511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegory/pseuds/Allegory
Summary: | Sheith month 2017: Day 17 "Right Hand" |It’s not like him but he does it anyway. After a dinner without their leader, Keith sits himself down in the dining hall with a notepad and pen in hand. There are these words inside him that he’s been choking on every day. Every morning he wakes up with them pebbling his throat, sitting at the base of his stomach, turning his heart swollen and tender to touch. He can’t form sentences with them so he writes down the words first.VictoryRainHomeUs





	we are silver and gold

Keith kisses the stump of his right arm, the gray mutilated flesh rounding out where it ends and Keith's lips begin. He notices the way Shiro tenses up, holding his breath in his chest.

"You okay?" Keith whispers, words easily lost in the whirring of the castle. Within moments it's as if he hadn't spoken at all, and the silence leaves him wondering if he really had.

Shiro just puts the holographic device down. He stares straight ahead at the walls with this blank expression on his face like he's gone somewhere else. Another life, another war.

Keith shifts away, an apology lodged in his throat. But he doesn't want to say it. He doesn't want to tell Shiro that he’s sorry for his survival. So he gets up instead, hands on his hips. The sudden motion snaps Shiro back to reality.

"Come on," Keith murmurs, heaving Shiro up from the ground. Or at least he tries. It ends up a little awkward as Shiro falls back on the ground with a small _'oof'_. They stare at each other, Keith processing the soft noise off Shiro’s lips. A faint blush heats Shiro's cheeks. Keith breaks out in raucous laughter.

"Geez," Shiro grumbles, picking himself up from the floor of the training hall. They've long since dried up after their workout session, grappling each other in the old way they were taught in the Garrison. Fighting superaliens with it isn’t very effective, but it jogs the nostalgia into their muscles and into their bodies until they’re filled with nothing but the thought of Earth, of home, of each other.

"Hey, remember prom?"

Shiro remembers. He remembers every second of it: the gentle scent of three frangipanis tucked behind Keith's ear, the silken feel of his tuxedo when Shiro placed his hand on the small of Keith's back. Ice melting in a bowl of fruit punch, glittering under the warm light of yellow and purple garlands. He recalls the music and their feet gliding across ceramic tiles. Everything felt as one: all the people of the world, even the music itself had dissolved until it was just a slow dance for the two of them.

Shiro glances at his right arm, the stump of it, and his Galran arm cast on the platform they'd been leaning on. Something he hadn't known was alive dies inside him. With its last bated breath it keens silently at the back of his mind.

"Hold me again," Keith says, because he knows how to lead the dance but he wouldn't do that to Shiro. He wouldn't take away the last semblance of control that Shiro can cling to, whether he denies it or not.

Shiro takes a step back, the locks of his white hair hiding his eye. "I can't.”

And then, as if he needs to remind himself, "I can't." His voice cracks the second time.

Keith doesn’t say anything. He moves towards Shiro and intertwines his right hand in Shiro’s left. He places his other hand on Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro’s limbs are as stiff and unmovable as stone and there’s nothing but pain in his eyes, an old wound being clawed open. Keith leans in, pressing his head against the loud clamor of Shiro’s heart against his ribcage.

Shiro shoves him away and his own back presses against the platform. He clicks on a button accidentally, bringing up a hologram to select training programs. _WELCOME,_ the walls echo all at once, and that mad animal the Galrans had bred named Champion possesses Shiro’s body. The Galran arm leaning on the platform zips into his stump like a key fitting a lock. Shiro bellows, his arm glowing an intense purple as it slices through several folds of metal. Electricity sparks and crackles in the air, wires malfunctioning in the central network of the castle. There’s a small ‘ _fwip_ ’ sound. Then the entire place is descends into a sea of darkness.

“Shiro!” The desperation seeps through Keith’s voice. He reaches out but the light of the Galran arm has faded and he grabs onto nothing but air. Pitch blackness; Keith gropes around like a baby kitten, blind and lost as he’d been before Shiro came into his life. The first time they had spoken in the stretches of desert and wasteland, a thunderstorm brewing in the horizon. _You’ve got a lot of good in you, cadet. You just have to trust me on that until you see it for yourself._

“I didn’t mean to—“ Keith starts, but then the lights come back on and Shiro’s already at the exit, his silhouette disappearing behind sliding doors. Keith chases after him but as always Shiro vanishes like sand between his fingertips, an hourglass that counts down the days and years and universes before Keith loses this broken soldier to the war he wasn’t there for.

Keith stares at the floor, his boots, and the tears that fall on either side of them.

*

It’s not like him but he does it anyway. After a dinner without their leader, Keith sits himself down in the dining hall with a notepad and pen in hand. There are these words inside him that he’s been choking on every day. Every morning he wakes up with them pebbling his throat, sitting at the base of his stomach, turning his heart swollen and tender to touch. He can’t form sentences with them so he writes down the words first.

_Victory_

_Rain_

_Home_

_Us_

The four words are written in big bold letters. Keith continues to scribble other thoughts but he ends up crossing them all out. Four words have exhausted his mental capacity. Four words is all he can do today.

Keith pockets the notepad and dreams of thunderstorms, thick shapeless clouds roiling in from the horizon. The noise of his hover-jet vibrates under his palm and he sees Shiro the way he had seen him the night before he left for Kerberos, the night before the Garrison’s first rain in two months.

_“Don’t go.”_

_“I’ll come back before you know it._ ”

Keith is in his shack in his dreams, Shiro’s sweat-slick hair tangled between his fingertips. He brushes the hollows of Shiro’s cheeks. They’re gaunt and his skin is cold, clammy. And then Keith is seeing him on that table in Galran rags, skin pale and gray as a corpse. The tent is a morgue. They bury Shiro without him.

Keith stumbles out of bed shrieking. He claws under his pillow until he finds his notepad and claws at it with his nails.

_You are not here beside me._

And then everything bursts out like water behind a broken dam. Keith gets up and finds his pen on the desk and he sits there, writing it all.

_There is victory in your veins._

_The rain wept when you left._

_Our home is still out there but we’ll never reach it again. So this is our home now, you and me._

_Let’s not lose any more of us._

Then he adds, thoughtlessly:

_We are silver and gold._

_Earth is waiting._

Keith doesn’t redo it on another piece of paper. He tears the page out, scratchy as it is, and gazes at it: the most important thing he’s ever written in his life. Keith sets it aside carefully and starts sobbing. _We are silver and gold. We are silver and gold._  He clings onto it like it’s the last thing that’s still real in the world.

It’s morning by the time his nose has cleared. Keith walks out of his room disregarding the redness to his nose and the rivulets streaking his eyes. In his hand is the folded note. He goes directly to Shiro’s room and places his palm against the door. He thinks of knocking, but he doesn’t. Instead he crouches down and slides the paper through.

A spark of light ghosts in the periphery of Keith’s eyes. He turns back and there’s a meteor shower outside the castle, rays of blinding red and white burning his eyes. He thinks of the thunderclouds and on that distant planet of theirs, rain starts to pour for the first time that summer. It’s going to be a long ride but somehow Keith knows they’ll make it. This time Shiro’s wars will be his wars, and he’ll be by his side every step of the way.

**Author's Note:**

> garrison has proms because i say so.  
> find me @ tumblr: warmwintersun/ ghostk-art. talk to me. im a whore for conversation. im a slave to sheith. use me wink wonk.


End file.
